Thursday, May 20, 2010

Shouldn't that be 'When the Euro fails...'?

'Ms Merkel believes that the EU should have stronger powers to organise the “orderly insolvency” of countries such as Greece that set giveaway budgets with no means of paying for them. After announcing a ban on speculative share trading in Germany’s top financial institutions and the bonds of eurozone countries until next March, she warned: “This challenge is existential and we have to rise to it. The euro is in danger. If we don’t deal with this danger, then the consequences for us in Europe are incalculable . . . If the euro fails, then Europe fails.”'

Quite funny really. I said this here, and mentioned the same thought to a number of people, who all scoffed and pooh-poohed the idea that that things were this serious. Well, news flash to those people who haven't been paying attention- not only is the Greek Problem extremely serious for the Euro, and by extension the EU, if the Germans stop playing this particular game, there is no game.

Without German, French and British participation, the EU would simply be another transnational talking shop, of which the world has untold numbers already. German productivity is about half of what makes the EU viable. If the Germans decide that playing sugar daddy to lazy socialists from Lisbon to Lodz is not the future they really want for themselves, the game is well and truly up.

"...If the Euro fails, then Europe fails". True, if you mean by Europe the great socialist European project strapped to the relatively unwilling European peoples for the last sixty five years. How many would mourn its passing? The EU is increasingly seen by Europeans as one of those terrible cranky old nineteen fifties ideas which has bizarrely managed to maintain a zombie existence into the twenty first century. How many would be happy with a free trade zone, and in every other way run their own affairs?